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Myproject4
Intro This page was created in order to document my progress on Myproject4, my first virtual production project. Created using UE 4.24.2 Objectives 1) To create a simple, highly detailed photorealistic environment 2) To record a handheld camera shot in that environment, shot by a virtual camera 3) To render that shot at final pixel quality Progress 2/1/2020 Created project. Initially, I thought to use Brushify in conjunction with Megascans assets, which presented 2 problems- 1 trivial, and one not so: The nontrivial problem was in blending Megascans meshes with the Brushify landscape material. Both are designed to be photorealistic, but they didn't end up blending together well and I think I would've gone down a rabbit hole trying to make them work together. It made more sense to source from one library, and Brushify doesn't have meshes. Megascans it is. The trivial problem was establishing a workflow between Quixel Bridge and Unreal Engine. It ended up being easy to set up, but there's nuances to be figured out. The layout is simple. It's a two forest paths intersecting with each other. I'll do this first by establishing the topology, second by saturating it with foliage and other flora, and third by set dressing it with trees and other peripheral details that establish a sense of story. The last thing will be lighting and atmos- there I'll try and keep it simple (slight haze, one directional light). I'm more or less set on the topology, and now I'm working on creating a foliage brush for saturating the side of the road. 1:39a 2/2 ... I re-tiled the landscape texture to a smaller value (0.03 or something?) to reduce repetition. I noticed it helped performance. Adding foliage to the scene has been relatively easy and useful. Right off the bat, I was able to create a foliage "brush" comprised of different types of grass and shrubbery. I scaled the grass up to make it more visible in the scene, changed the density so that one type of grass was more common than the other, and selected LOD4 for each mesh. This may or may not bite me later as the scene gets more dense. After my first foliage pass, I decided to bake in the lighting to see how things turn out. I'm wondering if it's possible to swap out LOD meshes without having to reapply foliage (edit: you can, right click the foliage type and select "replace with". After foliage, bakes are taking 20+ minutes, and baking has no visible effect. 12:21p 2/2 I've made some progress on the foliage issue. I decreased the density of the brush, and found that keeping a value of 0.03-0.05 is fine for most types of grass. For baking- I noticed the light sources were either classified as stationary or movable and my understanding is that baking under those classifications isn't feasible. Both sources are now static. Each time I bake, I get this error: InstancedFoliageActor_0 Instanced meshes don't yet support unique static lighting for each LOD. Lighting on LOD 1+ may be incorrect unless lightmap UVs are the same for all LODs. I've been using LOD0s this entire time, so I don't know what to make of this issue. I'm going to use non-0 LODs and see if that makes a difference. (update: it didn't) I've resorted to deleting all foliage instances and redownloading them from Quixel, this time in a TGA format (the initial format was JPEG; update: I hardly noticed any difference). I also went with a different landscape material that fits better with trees and logs, and downsized the overall area of the landscape to help with performance. I replaced the default sun with a point light (functionally the same thing). I changed the color temp to 5600k to replicate a daylight tone, and increased its luminosity to 15- 10 seemed too dim.The megascan stump seemed to blend more neatly with these changes. I imported a free environment asset pack for trees and grass. I noticed that swaying is present in the material previews of the foliage, but not in the scene itself. Downloaded Megascans asset pack from UE store to use instead and reduced lightmap resolution. Still having baking issues- stays at 99%. Might be UVs. This error persists: ☀InstancedFoliageActor_0 Instanced meshes don't yet support unique static lighting for each LOD. Lighting on LOD 1+ may be incorrect unless lightmap UVs are the same for all LODs. Having less static mesh instances (foliage) does not trigger this error, so this sounds like a scaling issue. 6:29p 2/6